WASHINGTON, June 25: A former CIA officer says he made repeated efforts to alert top agency officials to problems with an Iraqi defector’s claims about the country’s mobile biological weapons labs but he was ignored, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

CIA officer Tyler Drumheller said he personally crossed out a reference to the labs from a classified draft of a UN speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell because he recognised the source as a defector, code-named Curveball, who was suspected to be mentally unstable and a liar.

Drumheller told the Post he was surprised when a few days later, on February 5, 2003, Powell told the UN Security Council that ‘we have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and rails’.

“We thought we had taken care of the problem, but I turn on the television and there it was again,” said Drumheller, the CIA’s European operations chief before retiring last year.

He described repeated attempts to alert top CIA officials to concerns about the defector before Powell’s speech.

He said he also issued warnings before President George W. Bush’s January 28, 2003, State of the Union speech that included Bush statements about Iraq’s mobile labs ‘designed to produce germ warfare agents’.

The warnings had no visible impact on then-CIA Director George Tenet, the paper said, who vouched for the accuracy of the mobile lab claim in briefing Powell before his speech.

Tenet now says he learned of the problems with Curveball much later and received no warnings from Drumheller or anyone else.

The influence of Curveball in US claims about Iraqi bioweapons programmes has been described in reports by the Los Angeles Times and a commission on US intelligence failures, the Post said, but Drumheller’s first-hand account added new details of the CIA’s embrace of a source whose credibility was unravelling.

The paper said the source was living in Germany, where the country’s foreign intelligence service had granted him asylum and immigration permits for his family in return for details on one of President Saddam Hussein’s long-rumoured weapons of mass destruction programmes.

The German intelligence agency BND passed the defector’s stories to the Americans, but when pressed by the CIA it said nothing had been verified.

Drumheller said a German official told him at one point, “I think the guy is a fabricator.

“He said, ‘We also think he has psychological problems. We could never validate his reports,’” Drumheller told the Post.—Reuters